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To this day, the carousel continues and continues ...

Her eyes were adorned with delicate petals of color. Her smile blazed with the sweetest, unselfconscious joy. As she surveyed her choices, Juliana Moore, 6, selected a brilliant white steed and took the reins.

The carousel at any county fair is a place where childhood magic is still readily found.

For a tech-frenzied world, this old-fashioned wonder offers bejeweled and gilded beauty, fantastical creatures and a sense of the infinite.

Time, on the carousel, never stops. It becomes instead, an unending circuit of beauty, imagination and simplicity that brings us all back to an irreplaceable moment of childhood wonder.

As we ride those galloping beauties, we can’t help but smile as we glimpse the ones we love awaiting us in a motionless blur, while we sail past on our own journey.

I am somehow reassured by this simple ride’s survivability in a much-changed human landscape. I can venture a guess as to why the carousel still holds its enduring allure.

When I look into those wild-eyed creatures and see the flying manes, tails and scales, I remember that the world is a place of wide-open possibility awaiting anyone who is willing to take the reins — a lesson that seems so easy to grasp when one is 6 years old and a beautiful charger calls out your name.